Short Fiction

Writing a short story is wonderfully satisfying. Publishing short stories is a little less fulfilling. That’s because stories published in print magazines and anthologies are usually only available for a few years.

Recently, I’ve been working to make my shorter work available in ebook form. It’s wonderful to be able to make that work readily available once again.

Below, I’ve provided a list of short work that’s currently available, starting with work that’s available electronically. If you’d like me to let you know about future work, please subscribe to the Brazen Hussies newsletter by filling out the form to the right.

Stories Available Electronically

Points of Departure, my first short story collection, features an introduction by Kate Wilhelm and 19 stories written early in my career — including two award winners: Rachel in Love (winner of a Nebula Award) and Bones (winner of a World Fantasy Award). The collection itself won the Phillip K. Dick Award.

Women Up to No Good collects 16 stories written over the past thirty years. There’s science fiction, fantasy, even a few stories that defy classification — but all of them deal with women who are making trouble of one kind or another. In other words, my favorite kind of women.

About Fairies (also in The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven edited by Jonathan Strahan).
The way I figure it, you can choose what kind of fairies you want to believe in. Mine are grimy, hardscrabble fairies that hunt in the marsh with stone blades and feed on frogs’ legs. They’d mug Victorian flower fairies and take their stuff.

A Cartographic Analysis of the Dream StateThe cartographer on an expedition across the Martian Polar Cap knows that maps are black-and-white portraits of a world that exists in shades of gray and that dragons lurk just beyond the edges of every map. Beneath the polar cap lies an unknown world.

Bones (Winner of the World Fantasy Award)
The Irish Giant — that’s what Londoners called Charlie Bryne, an enormous country lad standing 8 feet tall in his bare feet. He had a deep connection to the natural magic of the earth and the blood of Irish kings in his veins. In 1782, he came to London with a single goal — to bring the Irish home.

Exploding, Like FireworksTwenty-year-old Angel is visiting Moon Talk, a space station built by poets and engineers, when an accident leaves her paralyzed, unable to return to Earth. But rather than spelling the end of adventure, Angel’s physical limitations prove to be the beginning of a new journey.

Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates
The bombs have fallen, and the world as we know it has ended. In her final days, one robotics engineer works to ensure that life will go on, constructing the creatures that will inherit the earth. New times are coming. The future echoes with the rattle of metal claws.

Rachel in Love (Winner of the Nebula Award)
Rachel has the mind of a teenage girl, but the body and the innocent heart of a young chimp. When the man she has always known as her father dies, she must come to terms with her identity and find her place in the world.

Stories Currently Available in Anthologies

If you crack the ice on the right Arctic lake and toss in a match, you can set off a methane flare. That’s not fiction. It’s true. (If you doubt me, watch this video of Katey Anthony, a University of Alaska professor, demonstrating the technique.)

That’s what inspired this story about the melting of the permafrost, written in collaboration with physicist Paul Doherty. The story is also available in Gardner Dozois’ Best Science Fiction of the Year #34.

Rachel in Love in Apes of Wrath (Tachyon, 2012), edited by Richard Klaw and Rupert Wyatt.
Provocative and fantastical, this anthology delves into the cultural fascination with — and dread of — humanity’s simian cousins.

Inappropriate Behavior in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.
Widely regarded as an essential book for every science fiction reader, this anthology collects outstanding stories from 2004.